Over the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to talk with some incredible teams making big moves in commercial real estate tech and I want you to meet them.

Dr. Jen Petersen - Conference Producer

I am serving as an advisor to the Commercial Real Estate Tech Talk - a one-day conference on April 25th, 2013 - produced by dear friend and colleague, the phenomenal Dr. Jen Petersen at Green Pearl, in conjunction with the Buildings NY Trade Show.

This has been *so* much fun for me as an investor because I used to think that innovation might come from us; the investment community and strategic buyers. That may be possible to a degree, but seems mostly humorous in retrospect. In the meantime, I have loved seeing an even fuller spectrum of ideas. I helped host a Real Estate Technology Forum through the Climate Change, Land Use and Energy Advisory Board with the Urban Land Institute in 2010 - phenomenal people, but with a focus on specific building applications - inspiring case studies which, sadly, have been difficult to replicate... Today, the discussion has shifted to include technology outside the building, focused on data and transactions. As a result, the speed of growth and the scale of change is on another level. Movement now is coming from service providers, and recently, a growing cadre of experienced CRE owners and brokers who used technology aggressively as part of their hustle to get ahead. Each eventually got so excited about the potential to do things better that they crossed over to the tech side. Now, they are building entire companies around transparency, efficiency, and big data in commercial real estate.

My work as an advisor to the CRE Tech Talk has been both inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable because the people involved in this space are without question some of the nicest, funniest, and most collaborative people I've come across within commercial real estate. There is an optimism and sense of delight, perhaps because they are fixing precisely the problems they struggled with for years. Their organizations seem to embody a learning orientation, an experimental disposition distinct from the risk-averse approach of many traditional building owners. (This makes sense: as discussed, software and technology are significantly faster, easier, and cheaper to fine tune than physical buildings themselves.) Mostly, they all want to change our industry. You might get a kick out of it too. Please join us:

Jacob Javits Center New York, NY April 25th, 2013Click through for a link to registration and a discount code as my gift to you, faithful readers. I would love to see you tomorrow and welcome your questions, suggestions and observations any time .

We've got Justin Bedecarre from 42 Floors as our keynote - which I am positively thrilled about, and a panel chock full of tech teams and power users which I'm honored to moderate. Many thanks in advance to Dr. Petersen for her boundless creativity, humor, and grace, and to the panelists for the fantastic contributions they are making to our industry. See panel detail below:

Featured Panel: Opportunity Search & Decision Making 2013Leasing, Marketing and Vendor Selection in the 21st Century Opacity is often aggressively defended as a competitive advantage in real estate. But it can also limit deal flow. In the last 12 months, the dramatic rise of new platforms for opportunity search from leasing to vendor selection to investment sales may indicate a shift in the nature of competition. Greater transparency is creating broader access to opportunity and, in some cases, allowing deals to close faster and informed by higher quality information than ever before. Join us for a spirited discussion with the fastest-growing teams in our industry and their users.

Which owners, brokers, operators and vendors are emerging as power users of the new platforms, and why?

Who is helped and who is hurt by new models for decision making?

What have start-ups and users learned through the design process?

Demographics, reporting regulation, tenant demands, VC funding: what is driving the proliferation of firms in this space, and what comes next?